Truth is Subjectivity: Existential Epistomology

I have had people get very confused listening to me discuss – with ardent passion – the absolute nature of reason, and then lapse quietly into existential pathos about the subjectivity of meaning.

And rightly so.

Epistemology is something that has a special meaning for me, as the problem of knowledge is precisely the thing that got me interested in philosophy in the first place. Like most children, “why?” was often the first word to leave my lips, but as I grew older it deepened into the far more problematic, “How do I know?” And so I turned to the great thinkers of the past to quell my questions. Philosophy has never been something casual for me, has never been a hobby; it has always been a deep necessity. And so I covered all of the great epistemological debates with wild vigor, passing through the rigors of Descartes, diving into Hume, considering Kant, and finally ascending into Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard says that “Truth is subjectivity”; but what of this apparent contradiction? After giving the matter much consideration, I feel that the answer goes something like this…

Take God, for instance. Take the logos, or any sort of divine metaphysical, a priori thing. Consider that it has an absolute nature. Well and good. But now ask a human being to conceive of this, or to come to grips with such a thing. The problem becomes obvious: how can a finite consciousness, with extremely limited perceptive capabilities, come to grips with an Absolute? How can he, with his imperfect mind, understand that which is perfect? He cannot. The knowledge itself is too much for him to take in; or, to put it another way, he does not possess the the capacity to comprehend it as it is. Thus, man’s relationship to any sort of absolute thing must be in an entirely subjective way, through mediums that are relative to that individual.

This takes the standard relativist attack on absolutism and turns it on its head: of course the absolute is indefinable; you are a finite being!

This is why evangelizing is almost a completely worthless enterprise. I say almost completely worthless because I imagine some good has come of it at some point in some remote or small way, but such an instance would be an infinitesimal exception. If, given as we have shown, the nature of the human consciousness does not allow for an objective understanding of things that are, by their natures, infinite, then evangelizing, or attempting to bring people who are almost certainly not receptive to some kind of objective knowledge about these things is ridiculous.

Truth is subjectivity. Again, this does not mean that truth is, absurdly, “what you make it”; this does not mean that I can change the very nature of things in some sort of god-like way. “Truth is absolute” and “Truth is subjectivity” should, in this way, prove to be no contradiction. OBJECTIVELY, Truth is Truth, with a capital T and all the transcendence associated with a priori things. The problem is simply that man, given his extremely limited nature, has no ability to comprehend a thing as-it-is. He relies instead on subjective interpretations.

6 Responses

“This is why evangelizing is almost a completely worthless enterprise. I say almost completely worthless because I imagine some good has come of it at some point in some remote or small way, but such an instance would be an infinitesimal exception.”

It took me a very long time and a lot of existential angst and insomniac nights to realize this. It’s a message I wish more folks could hear and understand. I often think of all the damage my evangelizing likely did and wish that I could unravel it.

D, I’m extremely impressed by you. I have never heard anyone utter that phrase before.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Christians still have no conception of the existential authenticity that this religion demands of them, and will continue to hopeless try and “save” people.
Except for making sure to disassociate from them, I have no solutions as of now. It’s a pretty wide-scale problem.

I like your phrase, “transcendence associated with a priori things”. A real moral standard and the laws of logic are perfect examples. However, I would argue that there is not only a transcendence aspect to these things but a PERSONAL aspect to them as well. What do you think?

Further, can you expound on the phrase, “truth is subjectivity”? If this statement is true, then why should believe it if it is subjective?

There is no need to mystify truth. It is simply the correspondence of external reality with a system’s internal representations of it. Philosophies like existentialism make the clean mirror (which the mind should be) dirty.

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